While the UK Border Agency's revocation of London Metropolitan University's right to award visas to international students still threatens hundreds - if not thousands - of students with deportation, private colleges have been running open days, and Universities Minister David Willetts has launched a £2million hardship fund package for those "legitimate students" looking for alternative courses.
So from one point of view, it looks like the government and those private colleges are working hand-in-hand to help those students who, through no fault of their own, are facing the biggest shake-up in their lives.But from another perspective, things might not be that rosy: huge cuts in public teaching grants mean universities have to depend on private income just to keep afloat in today's economic climate. So even though £9,000 a year is a lot for an English student to pay, it's the foreign students - who can legally be charged up to £20,000+ a year - who are bringing home the proverbial bacon, effectively keeping many institutions afloat, financially speaking. And that applies very much to universities across the board.
Even many of the elite universities around the country are desperate for foreign students, but financial cuts mean they don't have the facilities to monitor those students effectively. So there's bound to be some not-so-genuine student visa applications slipping through the net in the future, and how much trouble would universities like Oxford or Cambridge find themselves in when that happens when they get a visit from the UKBA?
Cynics amongst us, considering the number of Oxbridge products currently hanging out in the corridors of power down Westminster way, could be forgiven for thinking "not a lot". But that probably wouldn’t be the case for other, less privileged institutions, like London Met, in which case we can expect to see more of those £2million hardship fund packages in the near future. On the other hand, vocational training as an alternative could be a much more effective alternative to a market-driven, and increasingly unpredictable university education – as well as the amount of time it takes many graduates to find work of any kind, let alone the graduate position they’ve been preparing for, for so long.
